focal length: 200 mm
shutter speed: 1/200
aperture: f/5.3
ISO: 320
flash: fired

The image above is what I had envisioned when I took snapped the photo a few months ago, except this is all that I was able to get because I was using my 70-300mm lens instead of my macro lens.

I just couldn’t get close enough with my telephoto zoom lens. So, what did I do? I cropped it. A lot.

Ah, there. It’s looks a bit better but I wanted to clean up the image and clone out some of the leaves and petals out of the foreground and background. The petal on the top left corner was easy enough to clone out but the leaves on the bottom left corner required a little extra help.

I zoomed in and used the clone tool in Photoshop to roughly clone out the leaves. Then I selected around the patched area, added a feather to the selection and then applied a gaussian blur to smooth out my choppy handiwork. The smoothness of the gaussian blur didn’t really match with the grain in the surrounding area, so I just added a bit of noise in the same area to blend it together.

And there you have it; a simple, clean image with a little help from my really bad clone job.

I guess it’s not that bad, eh?

Laura is a Vancouver wedding and portrait photographer. Visit laurahana.com.